Exhibitions

June 6 - July 25, 2014

Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition of recent editions by James Nares and sculpture by Yuko Kimura. While dramatically different in form, the work of each displays the artists’ interest in expressive gesture, calligraphy, and the organic nature of materials.

James Nares, born in London in 1953, has lived in New York since 1974. His diverse practice includes film, photography, painting, sculpture, and a growing body of printed work made at Durham Press in Pennsylvania. Employing the same techniques used in his paintings -- a series of repeated single brushstrokes that record a gestural passage of time and motion across the canvas -- Nares’ new screenprints appear to consist of a single explosive burst of color across a white sheet of paper. The prints are deceptively complex, however, requiring as many as ten screens carrying subtle gradations of color. Each screen is printed in a slightly different profile, their composite gradually building to a rich and highly textured finished image.

Yuko Kimura, born in Oakland in 1968 and raised in Tokyo, received her MFA in printmaking from the University of Michigan School of Art and Design. Using her own intaglio prints combined with old Japanese paper and book pages, she creates intricately composed mixed media pieces and installations. Japanese craft traditions, such as indigo-dyed rustic cotton textiles called Boro, old woodblock prints, and calligraphic scrolls provide the raw materials for her work. The worm-eaten patterns found in the latter (called “Mushi-Kui”) and striations generated by pleating and stitching paper into cylindrical sculptural forms are put to poetic use. Simplicity, recycling, and history are central themes for Kimura, connecting her work to the aesthetic notion of Wabi-Sabi, a world-view centered on the transient and imperfect nature of beauty.

Nares’ epic and widely hailed film, The Street, premiered at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum, Hartford, Connecticut in 2013, and subsequently screened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, among others. Kimura’s work can be found in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Kemper Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, and the Tama Art University Museum in Tokyo.